I'm in the process of moving, which means that I'm sorting through scraps of paper that accumulated in my office. Some of these are short ideas which I kept because I'm fond of them. Rather than throw them away or retain them as clutter in the new office, I'm sticking a pin in them by posting them here.

It's as if, every time someone drew a picture of their father, they drew Ronald McDonald without realizing that there were other options.

Years ago, I was thinking about writing a paper about the then-ubiquitous computer font Comic Sans. I was not going to complain that it's ugly, because some people have bad taste and so disagree. Instead, I was going to argue that Comic Sans reflected a kind of alienation. People use a standard font like Times or Helvetica when they want to be serious and official. When they use a handwriting font or something else non-standard, they mean to be injective levity and personality into the thing they're typing up. But Comic Sans, precisely because it's ubiquitous, is not personal or expressive at all.